Staff profile

Ellen Charlesworth is an AHRC funded PhD candidate at Durham University. Having studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and then data science at Birkbeck, her current research spans digital humanities, museum studies, and digital art history.

Her research asks how we can improve museums online content, exploring data from museums’ websites and social media to identify sector-wide trends across the UK and Europe. She is particularly interested in the way that digital strategies are shaped by both funding guidelines and platforms’ algorithmic interventions, with her work on the use of privately owned platforms receiving coverage in the national newspaper Der Standard.

Her current project – supported by the Alan Turing Institute – combines the use of computer vision on scraped digital collection screenshots with an analysis of the html code of over 50,000 European museum webpages. It explores how museums have implemented online collections, asking what types of organisations are missing from the online cultural landscape and how their exclusion may affect our perception of the historic record.

• Digital Humanities
• Digital cultural heritage studies
• Human computer interaction

Conference Paper

• Schor, B. G. S., Norval, C., Charlesworth, E., & Singh, J. (2024, May). Mind The Gap: Designers and Standards on Algorithmic System Transparency for Users. Presented at CHI '24: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI, USA

Journal Article

• Charlesworth, E., Warwick, C., Impett, L., & Beresford, A. M. (2023). Designing for Audience Engagement Exploring the Use of Online Metrics in the GLAM Sector. magazén: International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities, 4(1), https://doi.org/10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2023/07/005
• Charlesworth, E., Beresford, A. M., Warwick, C., & Impett, L. (2023). Understanding levels of online participation in the U.K. museum sector. Museum Management and Curatorship, https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2023.2188478